In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Selena Rezvani invites leaders to rethink some of the most deeply ingrained assumptions about modern management. Drawing from her new book Quick Leadership and years of work with top-performing organizations, Selena challenges CEOs and senior leaders to examine the hidden forces shaping their teams’ behavior—especially the unspoken power dynamics that still drive command-and-control cultures even when leaders insist they’ve moved past them. Her insights land squarely in the real world: where expectations are rising, trust is fragile, and employees—especially Gen Z—expect to be led very differently than generations before them.
Selena begins with a powerful personal story that shaped her mission: reducing unnecessary suffering at work. From there, she unpacks how overwork culture became a badge of honor in many organizations, and why leaders who continue to glorify exhaustion will struggle to build sustainable, innovative teams. More importantly, she explains what leaders can celebrate instead—and how to shift the “hero stories” that quietly define organizational norms.
A major throughline in the conversation is psychological safety, but not in abstract terms. Selena offers practical, high-signal markers leaders can use to assess whether their teams truly feel safe speaking up: signs in the spoken, unspoken, and silent moments of meetings. She also challenges leaders to examine how they may unintentionally shut down dissent, even while believing they are approachable and open.
The episode also dives into modern leadership skill sets—filtering urgency rather than amplifying it, protecting teams from noise, resisting meeting overload, and embracing “selective excellence” instead of perfectionism. Selena offers pragmatic tools leaders can use immediately, from rethinking meeting dynamics to redesigning feedback routines that are informal, frequent, and genuinely useful.
The conversation closes with one of the most important themes for today’s executive teams: the disproportionate impact managers have on employees’ mental health. Selena brings data and perspective that will push leaders to rethink their weekly rhythms, their one-on-one structures, and their responsibility to the people they lead.
Actionable Takeaways
- You’ll learn why today’s “hero stories” inside organizations matter—and how changing them shifts what people believe earns respect, promotion, and recognition.
- Hear how Gen Z’s participatory mindset is reshaping expectations for leadership, communication, and power-sharing inside modern teams.
- You’ll understand the subtle power dynamics leaders often overlook—and the specific behaviors that signal whether dissent is truly welcome.
- Hear Selena explain how to spot the real indicators of psychological safety in meetings, including what to look for in silence, hesitation, or discomfort.
- You’ll learn practical ways leaders can counter urgency culture by acting as a “filter,” not an amplifier, and why this dramatically improves team performance.
- Hear how to rethink meetings using a simple question: “Is this worth pulling people away from their strategic work?”—and what great leaders do in the first five minutes to change the tone.
- You’ll learn why “selective excellence” is a competitive advantage for leaders—and how to decide what deserves your very best and what doesn’t.
- Hear Selena describe how to build a feedback culture
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